Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science in the Department of Government at Harvard University, where I also received an A.M. in Statistics. I work in International Political Economy, specializing in the politics of foreign direct investment, environmental and labor regulation, and industrial policy.

My current work centers on the interaction between foreign capital and state sovereignty. While existing studies have examined how foreign investors influence de jure regulatory standards, my dissertation book project asks whether and why governments, in the de facto enforcement of environmental and labor regulations, favor or discriminate against foreign-invested firms relative to domestically owned ones. I develop a theoretical framework to explain nationality bias in regulatory enforcement and test it in the context of environmental and labor regulation in the United States using granular administrative records and business registration data. The project also draws on enforcement records and business registration data from China, over 500 nationally representative firm surveys worldwide, and qualitative fieldwork. In other ongoing projects, I study how governments tax and regulate mobile capital through tools such as tax treaties and capital controls, and how nationality and nationalism shape these dynamics. I have received the American Political Science Association’s APSA Best Poster Award and the APSA-NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG).

Before Harvard, I received training in Comparative Politics as a master’s student in East Asian Studies at Stanford University and worked as a data analyst at Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, supporting research on environmental economics. I received undergraduate training in Japanese and International Relations at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. My regional expertise focuses on China and Japan, and I have also conducted dissertation fieldwork in Vietnam and Indonesia, interviewing foreign investors there.